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Associate Professor of Anthropology; Director of Graduate Studies
Ph.D. 1979, Northwestern, M.S. 1983, Illinois, M.A. 1973, Northwestern, B.A. 1972, Brown.
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Research Interests: Sociocultural anthropology; French society and culture; rural development; tourism; Europeanist ethnography and history.
Selected Works:
"Which heritage? Nature, culture, and identity in French rural tourism." French Historical Studies 25, no. 3. 2002.
"Anthropology in France." Annual Review of Anthropology 30. 2001. 481-504.
Shaping Modern Times in Rural France: The Transformation and Reproduction of an Aveyronnais Community. Princeton University Press. 1991.
"Good to think: The 'peasant' in contemporary France." Anthropological Quarterly 60, no. 2. 1987. 56-63.
Paysans, Femmes, et Citoyens: Luttes pour le Pouvoir dans un Village Lorrain. (Peasants, Women, and Citizens: Power in a Village of Lorraine), with C. Karnoouh and H. Lamarche. Actes Sud. 1980.
"Female forms of power and the myth of male dominance: a model of female/male interaction in peasant society." American Ethnologist 2, no. 4. 1975. 727-56. Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009 Over the past year or so, three students in the joint PhD program in French Studies and Anthropology have completed their degrees, all begun around the turn of this century (Wendy Leynse, Jelena Karanovic, and Jack Murphy). This is certainly a satisfying accomplishment for me, as well as them. They join about a half-dozen others who have earned the degree since the program was first established, nearly 25 years ago. As we originally expected, about half are now teaching in the non-literary track in French departments, while the others have positions as Europeanists in anthropology departments.
Our decision this fall to eliminate the joint degree program per se is, paradoxically, a tribute to the success of those who have completed it, as well as to the evolution of Europeanist anthropology over the past several decades. In the mid-1980s, when I accepted a joint appointment at NYU’s Institute of French Studies (IFS) and Anthropology Department, Europeanist anthropology was weakly developed in the U.S., and France barely figured on the ethnographic atlas as constituted by either French or foreign anthropologists. IFS offered a multi-disciplinary social science graduate curriculum on the study of France, with each course organized around one discipline. But it was challenging at first to find sufficient ethnographic material (in French or English) to put together a whole course on anthropological approaches. And well into the 1990s, virtually no one began their studies at IFS with the idea that anthropology might offer interesting ways to understand French society.
The joint PhD in French Studies and Anthropology, launched in 1985 by second-year student David Beriss (who in 1992 became the first to earn the degree), was part of a multi-pronged effort to help develop Europeanist anthropology in the U.S. This also included founding a Society for the Anthropology of Europe as a unit of the AAA (1986), publishing a Directory of Europeanist Anthropologists in North America (1987), and running a New York-area workshop on Europeanist anthropology (1985-8).
But the joint degree program was also designed to address the particular challenges then facing would-be anthropologists of France: Even compared to some other parts of Europe, France is the subject of an especially huge and distinguished body of scholarship produced by French, American, and other researchers from an array of social science disciplines (in the U.S.: especially history and political science), combined with (until recently) the virtual absence of much work in sociocultural anthropology. It seemed to me that to be a credible anthropologist of France, it was crucial to acquire not only rigorous training in anthropology, but also serious conversance with at least one of the better established disciplines defining our knowledge about France as well as solid connections with established French scholars sharing one’s research interests. The joint degree program aimed to cover all three bases by requiring students to divide their time between the Anthropology department and IFS, with a semester of coursework in Paris before undertaking dissertation research in France. This division of time and energies, of course came at some cost, even while (I think) it provided excellent equipment for working in an exceptionally well-studied but ethnographically unknown part of the world. Indeed, at least through the 1990s, virtually all (of the admittedly relatively few) American anthropologists of France had some connection to NYU—if not as former PhD students, then as holders of IFS MAs who went on to PhD work elsewhere, as scholars who had spent a post-doctoral year at NYU, or as participants in one or another IFS/Anthropology conference.
The 21st century landscape is considerably different. In particular, it is no longer nearly as peculiar as it once was to combine France with anthropology, and there now exist substantial French- and English-language ethnographic literatures on French society. The training needed to become a credible anthropologist of France no longer requires many of the constraints built into the joint program. Of course it remains the case that France—more than many other sites of interest to anthropologists—has been defined primarily by research in other disciplines, and is home to scholarly traditions granted substantial respect here at home. For those reasons, I would expect that NYU will remain an important center for the anthropology of France, largely because of the resources available at IFS, including course offerings, visiting French faculty, and non-curricular activities. Similarly, opportunities for a semester of pre-fieldwork graduate study in France remain active, and will undoubtedly continue to be an important part of the training offered at NYU to future anthropologists of France. In the absence of the joint degree program, students will have more flexibility in combining the array of resources available, in ways better suited to current realities. Their experience will certainly build on the accomplishments of the remarkable alumni of the joint PhD program in French Studies and Anthropology during the frontier days of this specialty. But the frontier is undoubtedly closed with the accession to professional status of Wendy, Jelena, and Jack (the latter two having also been undergraduate alumni of the program), and it is time to move on.
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